If you want to get up to speed on stuff that affects you as a developer, I Programmer Weekly is a digest of book reviews, articles and news written by programmers, for programmers. This one covers February 28 to March 6.

Programmer Puzzles

Joe Celko has posed another puzzle that requires you to think like a programmer. This one is all about Post tag machines, which have absolutely nothing to do with mail of any type but a lot to do with strings and computability.

We are still waiting for a next generation Kinect with improved resolution and other features, but meanwhile Microsoft Research is already hard at work implementing new software that could be more important.

We reported on Eulerian Magnification about a year ago. It is a very simple technique that can be used to let you see things that are beyond the range of normal human vision. Now the MIT research group has released its software for us all to use.

Solving a general linear equation is more than quadratic in the size of the matrix, but if it has a particular form you can now do the job in nearly linear time. The breakthrough is not only faster, it is simpler and has lots of uses.

The power of the human form seems to have the ability to captivate us even when its only a few inches tall and very clearly a machine. Is there anything more than amusement in a troupe of dancing robots?

Google is offering us a new lossless compression tool called Zopfli. it can produce zip files that are up to 5% smaller with no negative effects on the end user. There is a catch - Zopfli is much slower than your average zip.

Babbage's Bag

Theories of how we should organize databases are thin on the ground. The one exception is the work of E.F. Codd , the originator of the commandment-like “Codd’s Rules”. This approach to database has been codified into SQL - Structured Query Language - and so into most of the databases on the planet, despite what the recent NoSQL movement might want you to think. So what are Codd 's Rules and what is a relational database?